What Are We Fighting For?

Kathleen Marquardt — founder of the ridiculously redundant organization,
Putting People First, and author of Animal Scam: The Beastly Abuse of Human
Rights — vents hysterically in her apocalyptic warning to fellow speciesists:
“The real agenda of [the animal rights] movement is not to give rights to
animals, but to take rights from people—to dictate our food, clothing, work,
recreation, and whether we will discover new medications or die.”

Marquardt rehearses a standard objection, which approaches animal rights as
if it were a zero sum game where advances for nonhuman animals spell losses for
humans. fails to see that for the most part (the Animal Liberation Front, the
Animal Rights Militia, and other underground groups aside) the animal rights
movement adopts legal tactics with the goal to educate and persuade, not force,
people to adopt a cruelty-free lifestyle. Hardly against medical progress,
moreover, animal rights advocates advance strong critiques of biomedical
research and offer concrete and viable alternatives to testing and experimenting
on animals.

Moreover, Marquardt erects a false dichotomy and fails to grasp that a
movement wanting to confer basic rights on animals has to take certain “rights”
from humans. Acting as if some devious and exception principle is in play here,
Marquardt forgets that no freedom is absolute, and that a liberty is
legitimately curtailed where it harms or violates the liberty of another. The
same speciesist objections Marquardt levels against the animal rights movement
could just as well have been used against campaigns to abolish human slavery,
end child labor, and stop Nazi experimentation on humans.

Slavemasters and Nazis lost their so-called rights, and so too should animal
exploiters. Apologists for animal exploitation fear and loath animal rights
because they know it spells the end of their corrupt livelihoods and demented
traditions, and has radical implications for society as a whole (I dealt with
the fallout of the ban on cockfighting in my own rural New Mexico area).

Animal exploiters who complain that the animal rights movement seeks to take
away their freedoms are entirely correct – we want a world without fur coats,
circus elephants, and steaks. Acting as if some devious and totalitarian plan is
at work here, they fail to note that no freedom is absolute and rights and
liberties properly end where they infringe on the rights and liberties of
another subject. Slave masters and Nazis lost their so-called rights, and so too
should animal exploiters. The seemingly personal choice of eating meat is in
fact a profoundly moral action, in that it affects the interests and life of
another being.

I debated a noted anarchist on these points (links below) He argued veganism
is an authoritarian imposition on the new “enlightened” postcapitalist
collective. I responded it is consensual, the result of real education and
serious ethics; and is no more authoritarian to forbid that any other kind of
violence, allowing for debate over “special cases” such as alleged “survival
cultures. Banning meat consumption and murder of nonhuman animal innocents is no
different than other censuring practices, only speciesist thinking makes it seem
so. The new society should ban violence. Period. Ban prejudice and
discrimination. Period. Ban hierarchical domination. Period. If not, what are we
fighting for? Nothing I’d die for.

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